He was already on Cork Street by the time he remembered. McCreery’s house. The wake. Coming inside from the rain, and a woman passing them in the hall.
‘Well, that was nice,’ Alice had said. ‘What a fucking cow.’
‘Keep your voice down.’
‘I don’t believe it. I just met that woman five minutes ago and she blanks me, the death stare from hell.’
‘Who, the blonde?’
‘The blonde. Some cow from the Ministry of Defence. Dulong, I think her name was, Elizabeth or Lisa. Friend of Roth’s.’
Alice had been quite upset about it, needled and annoyed. On the way home she had mentioned Dulong two or three times, calling her a bitch and making jokes about her clothes. Only then, by comparison, did it occur to Ben how little Alice had talked about her conversation with Roth. He would ask her about it when she returned home.
27
Act as though nothing has changed. Do your job as if it were just another ordinary day. Make telephone calls to DJs, suppliers, bar staff, journalists, whomever you would normally talk to just to keep Libra up and running. Long-standing appointments? Keep them. A lunch with Macklin or Roth? Do not back out of it. You need to pick their brains and still make out that you’re their best friend in the world. Don’t overplay anything, Mark. Try to remain relaxed at all times. If you start to act suspiciously they will soon become suspicious of you. You have to make sure that when they go home at night the last thing they’re worrying about is Mark’s loyalty to the firm. If you need to contact me, use the informant codeword ‘Blindside’. Do not send emails from the office or make calls from your desk. Go to a public telephone or internet cafe and I can be with you in twenty minutes. My experience tells me that you will get opportunities when their backs are turned. Act on what we’ve taught you in the last two weeks and it will all be wrapped up in no time.
Randall’s advice rang in Mark’s ears, and yet he took to the task with an ease that could only have been bequeathed by his father. A genetic facility for the double life; an ordinary man in extraordinary circumstances concealing his true purpose from the world.
A week after the first meeting in Queensway, Mark had set to work. His first destination was the club’s main site in Kennington, where Roth kept unlocked offices containing papers, financial records and computer data that MI5 had never seen.
It was mid-morning, the time of day Mark most enjoyed visiting the club, when he could be alone in the vast, cavernous rooms with only a few cleaners for company. The floors were still sticky with drink and sweat from the weekend and Mark’s shoes squelched as he made his way across the lower level to a private staircase at the western end of the building. Through a security door, then up to level two, past the main bar and into a suite of dingy offices that reeked of stale air and sweat. He looked into all three rooms to check that he was alone, then fired up the closed-circuit televisions at the end of the corridor to warn him of any approaching employees. Having made photocopies of up to fifty documents in Roth’s filing cabinet, Mark turned his attention to his desk. The central drawer was locked, but he knew that he kept a key in a CD case behind the door. Sure enough, there it was, and he began searching through the debris of flyers, demo tapes and foreign currencies littering the interior. The contents were like historical artefacts, decade-old junk and trash from Libra’s earliest days. This was pure nostalgia, a glimpse into their vanished past, a time before the suit and tie and the Ibiza spin-off, when all that mattered was Time Out’s good opinion and three hundred punters on the door.
Then, right at the back, beneath a rave flyer from 1992, Mark found two floppy disks. They were unmarked and covered in fluff and dust, but he copied them on to his laptop with the certain conviction that he had uncovered something valuable. Weren’t disks, after all, the holy grails of espionage? Then, having replaced the key behind the door, he left the office. The entire visit had lasted just over two hours. He had moved through the building as if it were just another ordinary day, his role changed without visible effect from servant to spy.
Two days later, with Macklin in the Czech Republic and Roth skiing in Courcheval, Mark worked late at Soho headquarters and spent five hours going through the contents of their offices. He had doubts about this which he had kept to himself: namely, that any incriminating evidence would almost certainly have been secured in the basement safe, access to which was restricted solely to Macklin and Roth. Nevertheless, he followed the procedure mapped out by Randall. Again, filing cabinets and deskdrawers, and a thorough search of both rooms for compartments or concealed spaces.
Look behind pictures, Randall had told him, below carpets and underneath chairs. There may be documents hidden there, sequences of numbers or letters which we can make sense of in the context of other intelligence. Search for evidence of private financial accounts, correspondence from unusual sources, particularly the Cayman Islands, Jersey and Isle of Man, Turks and Caicos and other offshore territories. Make copies of bank statements, insurance records, anything and everything not immediately recognizable as Libra’s characteristic business. It’s possible Kukushkin are using Libra as a front for buying assets vital in regard to the facilitation of money laundering. Check Macklin’s records in particular. In the first instance, the legal end of transactions of this kind would almost certainly originate with him.
Finally, at 1 a.m., Mark switched on the computers in both offices and trawled them for information. It quickly became apparent that this was a hopeless task, too vast for one man alone at night with no idea of what he was looking for. Thousands of emails and documents relating to every aspect of Libra’s business: it would take a team of a dozen experts hundreds of hours to analyse them. Instead, acting on a separate request from Randall, Mark made hard copies of Roth’s and Macklin’s appointments diaries and placed them in a sports hold all now three-quarters full with documents.
It was almost 2.30 by the time he left the building, punching in a four-digit code to activate the security alarm. Shouldering the hold all he walked north and flagged down a taxi in Soho Square. Giving the address of his flat in Kentish Town, Mark zipped open the bag and glanced through Roth’s appointments: dinner with EMI in ten days’ time; two meetings scheduled for the end of the week with American representatives of a major Los Angeles record label; a haircut the day before that. Nothing unusual, in other words. Nothing encoded or obscure. Just another fortnight in the life of Sebastian Roth.
But then he saw it, two days back, an appointment that had been scheduled just hours before Roth was due to leave for the Alps. In his neat, looping script was written: Lunch 1 p.m. — Alice K.
28
‘I’ll tell you one thing. Seb wants to fuck my sister-in-law.’
‘Come again?’ said Taploe.
‘They had lunch a week ago. I saw the appointment in his diary.’
‘Yes, we noticed that. Did you say anything?’
‘Of course not.’
‘Not to him. To her.’
‘No. She’d only lie about it, say it was for a story or something.’
Taploe took a Kleenex out of a small Cellophane packet, blew his nose into it and said, ‘Has she been unfaithful to Ben before?’
Mark paused, wondering if the question was relevant to their investigation or simply an invasion of his family’s privacy.